Programmer at Valdivia International Film Festival and IndieLisboa; pre-selector at Jeonju International Film Festival; editor and critic at Revista Aquilea
Chile-born, Portugal-based Vanja Milena Munjin Paiva was studying sociology at university when she started working on the production side of a festival in Santiago. “I discovered a lot of filmmakers and ways of making films that at that time were not possible to access in other spaces,” she says.
Attending FICValdivia in south Chile for the first time in 2013 inspired Munjin Paiva to become a critic; she still writes for online magazine Revista Aquilea. In 2019 she joined the team of FICValdivia, and since then has added more curation roles around the world.
She created Tramas at FICValdivia, which “shows the poetic possibilities of cinema” from the past and present. Selections from last year include the 1992 feature Falling Lessons by US experimental filmmaker Amy Halpern, alongside shorts by rising Latin American talents such as Daniela Delgado Viteri and Celeste Rojas Mugica.
As someone who “always goes in search of the most distant from the mainstream, the canon or the established”, Munjin Paiva loves adventurous viewers and praises the student-heavy audience in Valdivia. When pre-selecting for Jeonju this year, she was encouraged that “their audience is very demanding and if they didn’t find something really radical in the programming they would complain.”
Munjin Paiva loves the collaborative conversations with her fellow FICValdivia committee members. “We share questions about the films and what we do, we allow ourselves to change our opinions, we let ourselves be convinced by each other, we talk about cinema, we learn a lot from each other and from the collective conversation,” she says.
Contact: Vanja Milena Munjin Paiva
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